The Challenge

The garage facility at PE Blake and Son was traditionally for the service and repair of our own fleet of vehicles and trailers. Our reputations grew and we started to service other peoples fleet too. After becoming a VOSA testing station this continued to grow to the current day where we service a number of customer fleets plus ad hoc service, repairs and pre-MOT checks.

The increased workflow led to increased paperwork for both the mechanics and the administrators plus increased print costs for the service pads.

Paper-based service reporting also meant that the engineers struggled to return service paperwork in a timely manner. It often took up to fifteen working days to have paperwork returned to the office. This meant that we incurred at least a week’s delay on getting invoices out for the delivered services.

We needed to implement a smarter way of working that would allow information to be accurately sent and received the same day.

The Strategy

iForm Pro™ from Footprint Solutions provided an instant, easily usable and paper-free method of meeting our real-time reporting requirements.

The solution is iPad™ based, simple to use and was met with minimal resistance from our service engineers. The Footprint Solutions team reviewed our existing form artwork and developed the iForm Pro forms in a matter of days. We couldn’t believe how quickly the solution was developed and the delivered form designs looked superb and required very little end-user training. iForm Pro™ delivers service forms from any site in just 15 seconds allowing our office team and one of our larger customers’ offices to understand exactly which services have been delivered and whether a job is complete. In the case of our customer, this has allowed them to cut the “Off the Road Time” to a bare minimum and plan transport and servicing more efficiently

This has allowed us to engage fully with our clients and deliver higher levels of service. Ad-hoc service requests are no longer an issue as the solution is able to capture engineer feedback (including photographs) of unplanned maintenance work that may be required. Since this information can be sent back to our office in real-time we can usually discuss the service requirement with the client and sign off any repair works immediately.

Key to the rollout success was the ability of the solution to capture handwritten information and automatically process photos.

The Result

iForm Pro™ was simple from the very beginning. A trial solution was set-up in days and the team transformed our service sheets incorporating both PE Blake and key customer brands.

The trial was an immediate success and we knew that iForm Pro™ was going to transform the way in which we did business. The solution is win-win and allows the clients to receive a higher level of service.

For head office we achieve same-day invoicing for jobs (previously invoiced on day 8) and service sheets are delivered throughout the day as jobs are completed rather than huge volumes hitting the admin team every once in a while. We can also monitor job progress as we know exactly when an engineer has finished on-site as the form is delivered just before they leave.

We have also removed the old administrative tasks that we used to have to do such as scanning service sheets and re-keying data into our sales system as the system provides PDF output as standard.

After just 3 months we couldn’t imagine having to run our business without iForm Pro™. The cost of running iForm Pro is cheaper than the cost of running a paper-based reporting solution and the Footprint team were able to provide our iPads with no up-front investment. There really is no downside to adopting iForm Pro™.